CITY ROOM; By Boat From Albany to Manhattan, and It Took Only Five Years

By COREY KILGANNON

Published: August 7, 2010

At noon on Friday, a strange-looking floating vessel -- picture a partially submerged Hummer with blown-out windows -- drifted up on a sandy stretch of Manhattan shoreline along the Hudson River, just south of the George Washington Bridge.

The two crew members leaped out, dropped anchor and popped a bottle of cheap Champagne.

''Hey mister, where did you come from,'' said Ameli Vasquez, 9, of Washington Heights, who watched the men anchor the vessel.

''From Albany, N.Y.,'' said one of the men, Dallas Trombley. ''It's our state capital, about 130 miles up the river.''

The two men -- Mr. Trombley, 26, and Rob Babcock-Ellis, 26, both of Albany -- had made it, after five years of trying: down the Hudson in a homemade vessel, using no fossil fuels, from Albany to New York.

They have tried the 135-mile trip every summer since 2006. Now, finally successful, they polished off the Champagne and treated themselves to a victory beer.

Mr. Trombley, a legislative analyst for the State Assembly, and Mr. Babcock, a tax technician for the State Department of Taxation and Finance, took a week off from work and left from a riverfront park in Albany at 7 p.m. on July 29, supplied with a cooler of food cooked by Mr. Trombley's mother.

By the end of the trip, the food was gone, the motor was broken, the batteries drained. The men were tired and sleepless and the cramped little vessel -- 15 feet from stem to stern -- was taking on about 60 gallons of water an hour, which the men countered by hand-bailing constantly. The rowing apparatus kept breaking and the men battled a nasty wind out of the south for most of the eight-day journey.

Early on, one of the four car batteries melted down. But powered by tide, motor and oar, the boat covered the first 50 miles to Kingston.

On Saturday, the sailors passed Rhinebeck, N.Y., where Chelsea Clinton was getting married, guarded by dozens of law enforcement vehicles and boats.

By Poughkeepsie on Sunday, things turned rough. A south wind blew up, driving the boat back upriver. They started rowing hard.

The men would take turns jumping onto the shoreline and pulling the boat by rope, while the other crewman kept it offshore with a pole. They did this near Peekskill and again south of Haverstraw all the way to the Tappan Zee Bridge. Near the Indian Point power plant, they made sure to pass at night, to avoid being stopped by security.

At Piermont, they got stuck in mud flats, hemmed in by a flock of honking geese.

The pair had planned on riding the southerly tide of the river every six hours, and then anchoring for the northerly tide. But the wind kept blowing the boat north.

''In the end, the primary means of propulsion was dragging and rowing the boat,'' Mr. Trombley said.

The men coined an expression: the wave line.

''There's a line when you get to Westchester County,'' Mr. Trombley explained. ''North of it, everybody stares and waves to you, talks to you. Once you hit Westchester, they just scowl at you.''

The pair's first vessel, in the summer of 2006, was a primitive construction of wood barrels, Styrofoam, sails, paddle and electrical trolling motors connected to batteries. It sank near Hudson, N.Y., after a day. Later that summer, they set sail on a floating dock and got as far as Kingston before the wind stopped them in their tracks.

In 2007, Mr. Trombley designed a cabin on a floating foam platform, but the vessel was burned by vandals while the crew went on a supply run just a few miles into the trip.

In 2008, there was a plywood-and-epoxy trimaran that leaked and finally sank in a rainstorm in Poughkeepsie.

In 2009, the men made a more elaborate craft, with a paddle wheel, a wood stove and a flying bridge control center that broke during a trial run. A quick replacement -- two canoes strapped to a Sunfish sailboat -- made it as far as Cold Spring before breaking into pieces.

In January, the men began making a fiberglass catamaran, to be powered by an electric trolling motor and a rowing station on the roof.

On July 29, they launched themselves downriver.

They wore bathing suits. They traded naps, sleeping in short stretches. The trip wasn't all pain. They drank a beer as they passed under each of the dozen bridges they sailed under.

''We consumed an egregious amount of alcohol on the trip,'' Mr. Trombley said. ''The food was the fuel; the booze was the motor oil.''

On Friday, the two men sat on the grass in Riverside Park, watching their vessel bob near the shore.

They still had to row it across the river to New Jersey, where they would meet Mr. Trombley's parents to hitch it up to a trailer and take it back upstate to his boyhood home in New Baltimore, where he hopes to keep it around as a pleasure craft.